Choosing a custom domain email provider sucks. They all cost money and are a faff to set up - I've used all three of the main ones (Apple/Google/Microsoft) so here are your options. There is also a secret "Exchange Online" plan by Microsoft that I'll link to at
Software
Small to medium sized development teams often grapple with the complexities of microservices architecture. While the distributed approach offers scalability and flexibility, it can quickly become overwhelming, especially without a large team to manage the infrastructure. Enter Microsoft Orleans, a framework designed to simplify building scalable, resilient, and distributed backends.
Gear
Four weeks with the world's smallest Android phone, the Unihertz Jelly Star
Blog
Why and how did we get here?
Software
.NET 7 is coming soon alongside C# 11. It’s possible to take a look at some of the new features now, including the bang bang (!!) operator and List patterns, which I think are really cool. Here is a video on the topic:
Software
I recently came across an interesting issue where after starting a new ASP.NET Core 5.0 .NET 5 project using the “ASP.NET Core Web App (Model-View-Controller)” template did not include the ability to update .cshtml Razor files without recompiling and restarting the whole app. There is a checkbox
Software
I’ve recently ended up needing to ask if the user really wants to navigate away from a page in my Xamarin app, Net Writer. Essentially whilst a post is being edited I don’t want the user to accidentally lose their progress, necessitating the need to inject a “Are
Tech
I am a great fan of Remote Desktop and have been using it for over a decade. It’s built in and just works. One gripe of mine has always been the poor framerate which makes animations and transitions super janky by default. In RDP 10 it turns out this
Blog
I’m working on porting Net Writer from UWP to Android using Xamarin Forms. The Google authentication is a little bit tricky as it is constantly changing. Working off this amazing blog post by Timothé Larivière got me 90% of the way there but there are some updates to the
Assume we want to automatically show the version number of your app in your UI, for example, the settings page or elsewhere. Your version number will normally be updated by your CI/CD system (updating Package.appxmanifest for UWP and AndroidManifest.xml for an Android Xamarin app). Create a property
I’ve published version 1.0.0 of a new open source package and a corresponding nuget package – CoreAdmin.CoreAdmin adds a nice set of CRUD screens to your .NET Core web app in one line of code! Adding CoreAdmin to your app Given a typical Startup.cs file, you
I recently hit the classic case of trying to add Indexes to a large table. Whilst Entity Framework Core supports creating Indexes online during migrations, not all versions of SQL Server support this. In the case that your migration contains the code: migrationBuilder.CreateIndex( name: "IX_TableName_ColumnName" table: "TableName"
I came across an interesting issue updating my UWP app to Visual Studio 2019 and a new Azure DevOps pipeline. “Associate with Store” no longer adds password-less PFX files named *TemporaryKey.pfx and *StoreKey.pfx to your project to sign your store submissions – instead in VS2019 it now adds the
Running Windows 10 Anniversary Edition? Click this link and say yes to the prompts (You’ll, er, have to press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to exit and sign in again). Back? You just launched the hidden Take a Test app. Windows 10 Anniversary now includes a chromeless kiosk mode that web
One fantastic new feature in the latest version of Windows 10 is an add on you can install that allows you to use an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution natively in Windows. This opens up a whole new world for developers on Windows, including access to the same class of Git and
Gear
It is increasingly looking like the Surface 3 is going to be discontinued. Microsoft is running out of stock on the 128GB / 4GB RAM model. Third party vendors are heavily discounting it, suggesting a clearance. The biggest sign of its demise is that Intel are simply going to stop making